Tennessee Williams | About Tennessee Williams | American Masters | PBS About Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of The American Stage About Tennessee Williams Comments Tennessee Williams at age 54 in 1965. Photo by Orland Fernandez. He was brilliant and prolific, breathing life and passion into such memorable characters as Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in his critically acclaimed A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. And like them, he was troubled and self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol and drugs. He was awarded four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by critics and blacklisted by Roman Catholic Cardinal Spellman, who condemned one of his scripts as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, offensive to Christian standards of decency.” He was Tennessee Williams, one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, Tennessee was the son of a shoe company executive and a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy and carefree. This sense of belonging and comfort were lost, however, when his family moved to the urban environment of St. Louis, Missouri.

It was there he began to look inward, and to write— “because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams’ early adult years were occupied with attending college at three different universities, a brief stint working at his father’s shoe company, and a move to New Orleans, which began a lifelong love of the city and set the locale for A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Williams spent a number of years traveling throughout the country and trying to write. His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago and went to Broadway. It won a the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and, as a film, the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams worked with the premier artists of the time, most notably Elia Kazan, the director for stage and screen productions of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and the stage productions of CAMINO REAL, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Kazan also directed Williams’ film BABY DOLL.

Like many of his works, BABY DOLL was simultaneously praised and denounced for addressing raw subject matter in a straightforward realistic way. The 1960s were perhaps the most difficult years for Williams, as he experienced some of his harshest treatment from the press. In 1961 he wrote THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and in 1963, THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANY MORE. His plays, which had long received criticism for openly addressing taboo topics, were finding more and more detractors. Around this time, Williams’ longtime companion, Frank Merlo, died of cancer. Williams began to depend more and more on alcohol and drugs and though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories and another play, he was in a downward spiral. In 1969 he was hospitalized by his brother. After his release from the hospital in the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. In 1975 he published MEMOIRS, which detailed his life and discussed his addiction to drugs and alcohol, as well as his homosexuality.

In 1980 Williams wrote CLOTHES FOR A SUMMER HOTEL, based on the lives of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only three years later, Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel filled with half-finished bottles of wine and pills. It was in this desperation, which Williams had so closely known and so honestly written about, that we can find a great man and an important body of work. His genius was in his honesty and in the perseverance to tell his stories. What did you think? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams's southern discomfort | Stage | The Guardian Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at West Yorkshire Playhouse Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams's southern discomfort The American playwright's masterpiece, an explosive story of sexual repression, has suffered at the hands of directors and censors Truth and lies ... Cat on a Hot Roof's original 1955 Broadway production.

Photograph: Associated Newspapers/Rex Features Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at West Yorkshire Playhouse Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennessee Williams's southern discomfort The American playwright's masterpiece, an explosive story of sexual repression, has suffered at the hands of directors and censors Share on Messenger Close Given that it is Tennessee Williams's best play, it is surprising how rarely we see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Since its British premiere in 1958, it has had only three major London revivals. Although many people know it through the disastrously diluted Elizabeth Taylor-Paul Newman movie , it is not that often seen on regional stages, either: I can trace four Scottish revivals in the last 15 years, but few in England. So Sarah Esdaile's new production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse , which opens later this week, should give us a chance to re-assess a play that, in the near 60 years since Williams started writing it, has been the source of endless controversy, confusion and debate. First, it's worth reminding ourselves what it's actually about. At its most basic, it confronts the issue that runs through all great American drama, from Eugene O'Neill onwards: the conflict between truth and illusion.

Set on a rich Mississippi plantation, Williams's play shows the conflict from many angles. Brick, an alcoholic ex-athlete, refuses to sleep with his vivacious wife, Maggie, supposedly out of guilt over the suicide of his old friend, Skipper: what Brick is unable to confront is his own, and Skipper's, latent homosexuality. Brick's father, a towering patriarch known as Big Daddy over whose inheritance the family squabbles, is equally unable to face up to the fact he is dying of cancer. The two illusions meet head-on in the great father-son confrontation in the second act. But, although the play offers a social critique and rich southern humour, it finally asks whether it is better to live by lies or truth. This may be vintage Williams but right from the start this particular Cat has been dogged, so to speak, by argument. The original 1955 Broadway production ran for nearly 700 performances, won Williams his second Pulitzer prize and restored a reputation badly dented by the failure of Camino Real. But, even though it was a big commercial success, Cat raised a fundamental issue. Whose text was it – the author's or the director's?

The nub of the matter is that the director, Elia Kazan (all-conquering after his 1954 movie, On the Waterfront ), persuaded Williams to exchange his original third act for one the director approved of. Specifically, Kazan asked for a last act in which Maggie was shown more sympathetically, the dying Big Daddy reappeared, and Brick underwent some form of moral awakening. Williams eventually published both versions, inviting readers to make their choice. It's a measure of Kazan's awesome power and Williams's desperation for a Broadway hit ("He wanted it passionately," said Kazan) that the author gave way to the director. Does it matter? I think it does. Williams's original version is leaner and sparer. Kenneth Tynan, writing about the text played on Broadway, picked up on a small, symbolic difference between the two.

Williams's original has Maggie, uttering her big lie to win Big Daddy's inheritance, say: "Brick and I are going to have a child." In the Kazan-approved version, this portentously becomes "A child is coming, sired by Brick out of Maggie the Cat." Director Sarah Esdaile, after researching all Williams's variations, has gone back to a 1974 script that combines the best of both the original and the Broadway texts. I'll be fascinated to see how this revised version plays in Leeds. Textual variations are one issue. A far bigger one, in the 1950s, was Williams's handling of homosexuality. Some people thought the play went too far, others that it didn't go nearly far enough. The critic Eric Bentley , writing in the New Republic, thought Williams ducked the issue by not exploring further Brick's real nature. Having been told in advance that this was the play in which homosexuality would finally be presented without evasion, Bentley wanly concluded: "The miracle still has not happened." But in Britain the whole subject was too much for the Lord Chamberlain, who then had the right to forbid plays a licence for public performance.

It is blush-making to think that in 1958, when Peter Hall staged the British premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, audiences had to go through the ludicrous fiction of paying to join a private members' club, the New Watergate , in order to see the play staged at the Comedy theatre. It is equally shaming to think that Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge , in which one man kisses another on stage, had to be presented under the same hypocritical banner. Only in Britain would it be assumed that payment of a small fee somehow insulated one from moral corruption; but such was the idiotic law until censorship's demise in 1968. America, however, had its own censorship problems. In the cinema, the outdated Hays' Code was used to limit freedom of expression. The irony is that one of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's great virtues is that it shows Big Daddy's tolerant understanding of Brick's sexuality. Richard Brooks's ridiculous 1958 Hollywood film was obliged to water down Williams's message for public consumption.

It may have had Elizabeth Taylor smouldering in a satin slip, but it offered no more than dark hints as to the reasons for Paul Newman's refusal to sleep with her and, as I recall, even denied that Maggie's attempted seduction of Skipper got as far as the bedroom. This was a badly neutered Cat that inspired Williams on one occasion to tell a queue waiting in line for tickets: "This movie will set the industry back 50 years. Go home!" The author wasn't much more thrilled with a 1976 Granada TV production , starring Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Here, according to Williams, Laurence Olivier mistakenly conceived Big Daddy as "a southern planter gentleman instead of a former overseer who struck it rich through hard work". In fact, you have to leap forward to 1988 to find a British production that finally did full justice to Williams's symphonic play. This was Howard Davies 's superlative revival at the National theatre, starring Lindsay Duncan as Maggie, Ian Charleson as Brick and Eric Porter as Big Daddy.

Everything one hoped for was there: the social satire in the shape of Brick's elder brother, Gooper, moving in for the kill as his father's cancer is confirmed; the comedy in the form of the "no-neck monsters", who constitute Gooper and Mae's family, putting on a tackily choreographed display for Big Daddy; and the defiance of Duncan's Maggie, announcing her pregnancy with tilted chin as if challenging anyone to dispute it. Since that breakthrough production, London has seen two other major revivals. In 2001, Anthony Page staged the play with three American actors in the lead roles: Brendan Fraser as Brick, Frances O'Connor as Maggie and Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. I said at the time it caught well "the passion and power of the state of Tennessee", but it has left few indelible memories. Far more impressive was the 2009 import of Debbie Allen's Broadway production, with a distinguished all-black cast. Ethnicity mattered here less than the production's emotional firepower: Sanaa Lathan 's Maggie was so sizzlingly sensual she almost burned a hole in the satin bedsheets.

The confrontation between Adrian Lester 's Brick and James Earl Jones 's Big Daddy was equally overwhelming: I've never forgotten the latter's shift from crude vulgarian, doing obscene pelvic thrusts as a sign of his sexual power, to anxious therapist as he sought to analyse and articulate his son's problem. It is probably easier now than it was in the 1950s to get a handle on Williams's play. A work considered salacious and sensationalist by some, and overly cautious by others, can now be seen in its true colours. What Williams does is expose the twin illusions, especially prevalent in the America in which he wrote, that sexuality is some kind of rigidly predetermined absolute, and that possessions can protect you against death. Above all, the play is an attack on a world in which we lie to ourselves and others; and it's a sign of Williams's subversive and still under-rated humour that, in finally supporting Maggie's lie, Brick adds to the mendacity he has hitherto assailed. It's an astonishing, multi-faceted play that, in Britain, has taken us decades to appreciate.

Topics A society drowning in bourbon-coloured water is not the easiest of illusions to create on stage, as Alfred Hickling discovers as part of our unique crowd-sourced theatre project Published: 5 Oct 2012 Tennessee Williams - Biography - IMDb Tennessee Williams Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (3) | Trivia (25) | Personal Quotes (12) | Salary (1) Overview (3) Thomas Lanier Williams Mini Bio (3) Tennessee Williams met long-term partner Frank Merlo in the summer of 1948 (Merlo died of lung cancer in the fall of 1963). Though separated briefly in 1961 and again in 1962, the two were partners for 15 years. Merlo acted as his personal manager/secretary. Williams spent much of his most prolific years in Rome, Italy, and his enduring friendship with Italian stage and screen legend Anna Magnani lasted 24 years and inspired both "The Rose Tattoo" and "Orpheus Descending". Magnani realized the lead parts of these two plays, which were written for her, in their film versions.

The turbulent and inspirational friendship shared between Williams and Magnani is the subject of the internationally acclaimed play "Roman Nights" by Franco D'Alessandro. Aside from his published "Memoirs", the only authorized biographical book on Williams is by Bruce Smith, entitled "Costly Performances - Tennessee Williams; The Last Stage." This book deals with the last four years of Williams' life (1979-1983). - IMDb Mini Biography By: Franco D'Alessandro Tennesse Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes, for "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1947) and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955). His other major plays include "Summer and Smoke" (1948), "The Rose Tattoo" (1951), "Camino Real" (1953), "Sweet Bird of Youth" (1959), and "The Night of the Iguana" (1961).

In addition to his two Pulitzers, Williams was nominated four times for the Tony Award for Best Play, wining once, for "The Rose Tattoo." (His last Best Play Tony Award nomination came 16 years after his death, for "Not About Nightingales.") He was born Thomas Lanier Williams, III in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911, to Cornelius Williams, a traveling salesman who denigrated his sensitive son, who was homosexual, as "Miss Nancy," and the former Edwina Dakin, who like many of her son's heroines thought of herself as a Southern belle. He first began to write while afflicted with paralysis as a child, which affected him between the ages of five and seven, turning him into an invalid for two years. At the age of 13, his mother -- who encouraged his writing -- gave him a typewriter. The young Tom Williams wrote his first play "Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! When he was a teenager, in 1935.

He became a published writer at the age of 16, winning third prize (and $5) for his essay "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" in a contest run by the magazine "Smart Set." The magazine "Weird Tales" published his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in 1928. When young Tom Williams was 17, the family moved to St. Louis, where it existed in reduced circumstances during the Great Depression. It was a "setting" that would influence his first masterpiece, "The Glass Menagerie." He went to the University of Missouri-Columbia for his higher education, where his fraternity brothers gave Ham the nickname "Tennessee" due to his deep southern accent. Later, he transferred to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri but did not take his degree until he was 28 years old, from the University of Iowa, where he matriculated in the school's writing program. Before attending Iowa, Williams led an itinerant life, including some time as a hobo wandering California and Mexico. He moved to New Orleans in 1939, he renamed himself "Tennessee," ostensibly in homage to the state of his father's birth.

In New Orleans, Williams lived in the French Quarter, where he labored for the Works Progress Administration's writers program. His first play, "A Battle of Angels," failed in Boston during tryouts in 1940. (He later reworked it as "Orpheus Descending" which debuted on Broadway in 1957.) Though the play failed, it made Williams known, and he worked as a contract writer, briefly, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he sketched out the play that would become "Menagerie," his first great success. The tragic poet Hart Crane was one of his early influences, but as a playwright, it was Henrik Ibsen who had the greatest impact on him. Williams learned the Scandinavian literary dialect used by Ibsen to better understand his plays. Tennessee was close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia after accusing her father of making sexual advances towards her. Rose was institutionalized, eventually spending most of her life in mental institutions. Cornelius and Edwina Williams permitted Rose to received a prefrontal lobotomy, which was performed in 1937 and which incapacitated her.

Tennessee Williams was haunted by his sister's tragedy for the rest of his life, and never forgave his parents for authorizing the operation. Tennessee Williams suffered from depression, and feared going mad. He was briefly institutionalized in 1969 after a severe nervous breakdown, and never forgave his younger brother Dakin for allowing him to be put into a madhouse, which was a nightmare, according to his 1975 memoir. Part of Williams' problem, aside from his alcoholism, was that in the 1960s, he had become addicted to prescription drugs. The failure of "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More" signaled the end of Williams greatness as a dramatist and his dominance of Broadway theater. The original January 1963 Broadway production of "Milk Train," starring Hermione Baddeley, closed after 16 performances. Almost exactly a year later, a production directed by Tony Richardson , red hot after directing the movie Tom Jones (1963), and featuring Tallulah Bankhead and Tab Hunter , closed after five performances. Williams never recovered.

His next original Broadway production, "Slapstick Tragedy" (an omnibus of two short plays) closed after seven performances in 1966. "The Seven Descents of Myrtle," another original, lasted but 29 performances in 1968. "Outcry" lasted but 12 performances in 1973, while the dual bill of "A Memory of Two Mondays" and "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" (the movie Baby Doll (1956) is based on the latter play) lasted 63 performances in 1976, but "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" closed after 24 performances, and "Vieux Carré" didn't last a week, closing after six performances in 1977. The last Broadway original produced during Williams' lifetime, "Clothes for a Summer Hotel," lasted just 14 performances in 1980.

Two Broadway originals have been produced posthumously, "Garden District" that consisted of "Something Unspoken" and "Suddenly, Last Summer" which ran for 31 performances in 1995, and the early play "Not About Nightingales," which ran for 125 performances in 1999 and was nominated for a Best Play Tony. Tennessee Williams died on February 25, 1983, after choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops that became lodged in his throat. (Williams was plagued by eye problems much of his adult life.) He was 71 years old. That his plays continue to be revived successfully on Broadway and on stages all over the world more than a half-century after their debuts is testament to his greatness as a dramatist. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Jon C. Hopwood Tom L. Williams, also known as Tennessee Williams, moved to St. Louis, MO at the age of 7, with his family, including his mother and sister, Rose. He lived there for the next 20 years in a number of middle-class and upper middle class apartment complexes and one rented home.

He went to the Field School as a child, and attended Soldan and University City High Schools. He attended Washington University, and his first professional play was produced while he was a student there. He failed Greek his senior year and did not graduate. As a young man, after attended the University of Missouri for 3 years, he worked at the International Shoe Company in Downtown St. Louis with his father. Tom, the character in Street Car Named Desired, also worked at a shoe factory in St. Louis. Indeed, all of Tennessee's most noted works were formed, shaped and sometimes written, during his life as a child, teenager and young man in St. Louis, MO from 1918 - 1940 or so... Tennessee Williams is a native of St. Louis, MO who owes his life's work to his life there. New Directions Publishing Company - Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams America’s playwright Arguably America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi on March 26, 1911. The son of a salesman and a Southern belle, Williams spent his much of his early childhood in the parsonage of his beloved grandfather, an Episcopal priest, but moved with his family to St.

Louis, where he attended high school and began to write. Forced by his father to leave the University of Missouri and take a 9-to-5 job in a shoe factory, Williams became more and more determined to be a successful writer. He took classes at Washington University in St. Louis, and wrote his first plays. In 1938 he earned a degree fro the Univeristy of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. Of the theater he remarked: “know it’s the only thing that saved my life.” By 1939, he had adopted the name of Tennessee Williams, written Battle of Angels (for which he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant) and found his loyal and intrepid agent Audrey Wood. His first great success came in 1944 with his “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago to rave reviews and moved to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year. A Streetcar Named Desire, his next play, was a huge success in 1947 and established Williams as the premiere American playwright of his generation.

Between 1948 and 1959, he enjoyed a string of Broadway successes, including Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had won two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and a Tony Award. Movies were made of many of his plays and brought him huge success, renown and wealth. He continued to write voraciously, every day, producing novels, stories, and many new, radical and inventive plays, which did not always meet with the public’s approval, but which are now being revived and re-staged to great acclaim. As well as being astonishingly talented and prolific, Tennessee Williams was a man of considerable personal courage, willing to be open about being a gay man at a time when few were. Tennessee Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions, as we publish everything he wrote in his storied career. He is also our single bestselling author.

by Tennessee Williams Biography | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver Williams, Tennessee Biography of Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams was a master playwright of the twentieth century, and his plays A Streetcar Named Desire , The Glass Menagerie , and Cat On A Hot Tin Roof are considered among the finest of the American stage. At their best, his twenty-five full-length plays combined lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness, and hypnotic violence. He is widely considered the greatest Southern playwright and one of the greatest playwrights in the history of American drama. Born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, he suffered through a difficult and troubling childhood. His father, Cornelius Williams, was a shoe salesman and an emotionally absent parent. He became increasingly abusive as the Williams children grew older. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of a Southern Episcopal minister and had lived the adolescence and young womanhood of a spoiled Southern belle. Williams was sickly as a child, and his mother was a loving but smothering woman. In 1918 the family moved from Mississippi to St. Louis, and the change from a small provincial town to a big city was very difficult for Williams' mother.

The young Williams was also influenced by his older sister Rose's emotional and mental imbalance during their childhood. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri. After two years his father withdrew him for flunking ROTC, and he took a job at his father's shoe company. He despised the job but worked at the warehouse by day and wrote late into the night. The strain was too much, and in 1935 Williams had a nervous breakdown. He recovered at his grandparents' home in Memphis, and during these years he continued to write. Amateur productions of his early plays were produced in Memphis and St. Louis. Rose's mental health continued to deteriorate as well. During a fight between Cornelius and Edwina in 1936, Cornelius made a move towards Rose that he claimed was meant to calm her. Rose thought his overtures were sexual and suffered a terrible breakdown. Her parents had her lobotomized shortly afterward. Williams went back to school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He then moved to New Orleans, where he began going by the name Tennessee, a nickname he'd been given in college thanks to his southern drawl.

After struggling with his sexuality through his youth, he finally entered a new life as a gay man, with a new name, a new home, and a promising new career. In the early 40s, Williams moved between several cities for different jobs and playwriting classes, also working at MGM as a scriptwriter. In 1944 came the great turning point in his career: The Glass Menagerie. First produced in Chicago to great success, the play transferred to Broadway in 1945 and won the NY Critics Circle Award. While success freed Williams financially, it also made it difficult for him to write. He went to Mexico to work on a play originally titled The Poker Night. This play eventually became one of his masterpieces, A Streetcar Named Desire. It won Williams a second NY Critics' Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, enabling him to travel and buy a home in Key West as an escape for both relaxation and writing. The year 1951 brought The Rose Tattoo and Williams' first Tony award, as well as the successful film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivian Leigh. Around this time, Williams met Frank Merlo.

The two fell in love, and the young man became Williams' romantic partner until Merlo's untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose, would go insane. The following years were some of Williams' most productive. His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences, including The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Night of the Iguana (1961), and many others. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize, and was his last truly great artistic and commercial success. He gave American theatergoers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply interested in something he called "poetic realism," namely the use of everyday objects which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning.

His plays also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behavior: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths. Williams himself often commented on the violence in his own work, which to him seemed part of the human condition; he was conscious, also, of the violence in his plays being expressed in a particularly American setting. As with the work of Edward Albee, critics who attacked the "excesses" of Williams' work often were making thinly veiled attacked on his sexuality. Homosexuality was not discussed openly at that time, but in Williams' plays the themes of desire and isolation reveal, among other things, the influence of having grown up gay in a homophobic world. The sixties brought hard times for Tennessee Williams. He had become dependent on drugs, and the problem only grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo in 1961. Merlo's death from lung cancer sent Williams into a deep depression that lasted ten years. Williams was also insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger playwrights. His sister Rose was in his thoughts during his later work.

The later plays are not considered Williams' best, including the failed Clothes for a Summer Hotel. Overwork and drug use continued to take their toll on him, and on February 23, 1983, Williams choked to death on the lid of one of his pill bottles. He left behind an impressive body of work, including plays that continue to be performed the world over. In his worst work, his writing is melodramatic and overwrought, but at his best Tennessee Williams is a haunting, lyrical, and powerful voice, and one of the most important forces in twentieth-century American drama. Study Guides on Works by Tennessee Williams THEATER REVIEW; Big Daddy's Ego Defies Death and His Family - The New York Times The New York Times Theater |THEATER REVIEW; Big Daddy's Ego Defies Death and His Family Search Continue reading the main story There's nothing remotely feline about the critter who rules the new revival of ''Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,'' which opened last night at the Music Box Theater.

As the Southern patriarch Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of familial lies and loneliness, Ned Beatty brings to mind a rooster bred for cockfighting, just released from his cage and rarin' to ruffle feathers. It may be rotten ole mendacity that Big Daddy insists he sniffs in his battleground of a homestead on his 65th birthday. But from the moment Mr. Beatty first shows up in the play's second act, he brings with him the invigorating breeze of passionate, scrupulously detailed acting. As long as he is allowed to dominate the stage, Anthony Page's production exhales the galvanizing honesty that is the elusive holy grail for Big Daddy, as it was for the playwright who invented him. Before Mr. Beatty arrives, the predominant aroma is definitely more artificial, like a magnolia-scented air freshener. This mostly has to do with the undeniably luscious-looking movie star Ashley Judd as Maggie the Cat.

The first act largely belongs to Maggie, a blood-pumping life force of a woman, as she tries to win back the, er, affections of her terminally disgusted, alcoholically abstracted husband, Brick (Jason Patric, another luscious-looking film actor), Big Daddy's favorite son. Continue reading the main story This should be the most purely entertaining part of ''Cat.'' (It's all that a lot of people remember about it, thanks to the bowdlerized 1958 film version starring a lusty Elizabeth Taylor.) But in this production, it feels more like a teaser for the main event that is Mr. Beatty. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Ms. Judd, seen somewhat more advantageously on Broadway in a revival of ''Picnic'' in 1994, delivers her arialike monologues with clarity enough for the audience to savor their scorching wit and priceless Southern grotesqueries. But it's the performance of a self-conscious pupil in an elocution class. As Ms. Judd gulps down a breath before taking on the next ornate hurdle of a sentence, you can imagine the penciled markings in her script.

Although she is often funny (as well as beautiful) when Maggie gets really angry, this actress, so appealingly effortless in films like ''Ruby in Paradise,'' shows little spontaneity in ''Cat.'' Fortunately, there is much more to ''Cat'' than Maggie. The play may have had the longest original run of any of Williams's works for reasons of notoriety. After all, ''Cat'' dared in 1955 not only to address the problems of a woman whose husband wouldn't sleep with her but also hinted at homosexual longings in a man as masculine as Ben Gazarra, who played Brick to Barbara Bel Geddes's Maggie. But the core of ''Cat'' -- and the reason it still resonates as one of the great American dramas -- is both more primal and more complex. Williams's favorite among his plays, it is perhaps his most impassioned and articulate statement on human isolation, the wrenching problems of communication between people and the ways in which death defines life. These sentiments are expressed most forcefully in Act II, when Big Daddy takes his shot at bringing Brick back to life. As Mr.

Beatty plays the scene, which was inspired by one of Williams's last conversations with his terminally ill father, you understand why the playwright wrote that with Big Daddy he achieved ''a kind of crude eloquence of expression . . . that I have managed to give no other character in my creation.'' Big Daddy is dying of cancer but has been deceived into thinking he suffers from only a spastic colon. And Mr. Beatty, who wears his sand-colored suit as if sheathed in sunlight, projects the heady omnipotence of a man who believes he has ''just now returned from the other side of the moon, death's country.'' The form in which he has emerged from this journey has little in common with the mother of all Big Daddys: Burl Ives, who originated the part on stage and screen as a mythic, mountainous vulgarian. Mr. Beatty's patriarch is a strutting, jig-dancing bantam, a Napoleonic figure who has willed himself into wealth and power. What Mr. Beatty does better than any other Big Daddy I've seen is to convey without caricature the monstrous, exhilarated egotism of a man who believes he has outrun death.

This is especially evident in the giddy cruelty with which he dismisses Big Mama (the funny and affecting Margo Martindale), the wife he has only pretended to love for 40 years. Advertisement Continue reading the main story When he jokily threatens to hit her with his birthday cake, it's actually shocking. And he brings the casual contempt of a man waving away gnats to Big Daddy's dealings with the greedy Gooper (Michael Mastro), his older son, and Mae (Amy Hohn), Gooper's predatory wife, not to mention their hideous children, the immortally named ''no-neck monsters.'' Yet this is also a man who for the first time has applied his native shrewdness to cosmic questions. And Mr. Beatty makes it heart-stoppingly clear that it's Big Daddy's sudden awareness of life's brevity that leads him into confrontation with Brick, the one person he genuinely loves. Mr. Beatty brings out the best in Mr. Patric. This chiseled-faced actor, who appears to have spent many hours watching Marlon Brando and James Dean movies, takes Brick's self-anesthetized state to sometimes exasperating extremes.

If there's no discernible spark of life left in this former sports hero, who's in perpetual mourning for the death of his best friend, then there's no dramatic tension in the campaign to resurrect him. It's a losing game from the get-go. But with Mr. Beatty's prodding, this Brick awakens reluctantly and desperately to long-suppressed emotions. The resulting indignation and agony sting like a salted wound. Mr. Page -- who directed a brilliant ''Doll's House'' in 1997 as well as ''Cat'' (also with Mr. Beatty) in London two years ago -- does admirably in elucidating the play's patterns of evasion and power struggles. The late Maria Bjornson's airy rendering of Brick and Maggie's bedroom gracefully suggests an ephemeral world in which walls offer neither protection nor privacy. The so-called fourth wall between stage and audience is used here as a bank of mirrors, in which people keep checking themselves and the reflections of others. And Mr. Page makes acutely pointed use of the injured Brick's crutch as a tool in family power plays. You'll find in your program a note from Mr. Page about the play's third act.

There are three versions of it, since Williams was asked by the director Elia Kazan to rewrite his original, bleaker ending. (The one used here is a variation on the adaptation Williams provided for the 1974 revival.) No matter the version, it's the weakest of the acts, as the greedy Gooper and Mae -- portrayed here with the usual gargoylish glee by Mr. Mastro and Ms. Hohn -- get their comeuppance. Ms. Martindale, who finds depths of pathos as well as the sad silliness in Big Mama, and Mr. Beatty, in a fleeting reappearance, give the act what substance it has. But it's Ms. Judd who is required to make it sing, and she's simply not up to it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story That said, this ''Cat'' offers thought-plumbing pleasures too seldom found on Broadway these days. In an essay about ''Cat,'' Williams spoke of his ability to open himself up to audiences in ways he felt he never could in social situations. ''I want to go on talking to you as freely and intimately about what we live and die for as if I knew you better than anyone else whom you know,'' he wrote. Mr.

Beatty guarantees that the conversation goes on. CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF By Tennessee Williams; directed by Anthony Page; sets by Maria Bjornson; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Howard Harrison; sound by Christopher Cronin; music composed by Neil McArthur; technical supervisor, Gene O'Donovan; company manager, G. Eric Muratalla; production stage manager, Susie Cordon; general management, Robert Cole and Lisa M. Poyer. Presented by Bill Kenwright. At the Music Box Theater, 239 West 45th Street, Manhattan. WITH: Ashley Judd (Maggie), Jason Patric (Brick), Amy Hohn (Mae), Michael Mastro (Gooper), Margo Martindale (Big Mama) and Ned Beatty (Big Daddy).

Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 | Library of America Library of America Back Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 Print Share Tennessee Williams : Plays 1937–1955 The Glass Menagerie | A Streetcar Named Desire | Summer and Smoke | The Rose Tattoo | Camino Real | Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | 14 other plays More Edited by Mel Gussow and Kenneth Holditch “The Library of America has published Tennessee Williams’s essential ’Plays’—33 of them—in two volumes totaling about 2,000 pages. Not every play is included here, but these two volumes constitute all that matter, the works of a master of his craft, with all the author’s introductions, notes, and pertinent essays.”— The Los Angeles Times Book Review Overview Table of Contents Overview This Library of America volume is currently available only in the two-volume boxed set of Williams’s collected plays. Tennessee Williams’s explosive, often violent, plays shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. They inspired some of the most famous productions and performances in theatrical and film history, and they continue to grip audiences all over the world.

Now, in an authoritative two-volume edition, The Library of America collects the plays that define Williams’s extraordinary range and achievement. This first volume begins with the stunning rediscovered plays of Williams’s early career: Spring Storm, a tragedy of provincial longing that prefigures the mood and language of his later work, and Not About Nightingales, a stark prison drama, produced in 1998 to international acclaim, that resounds with the playwright’s outraged idealism. With the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie in 1944, Williams attained what he later called “the catastrophe of success,” a success made all the greater by A Streetcar Named Desire, his most famous play and one of the most influential works of modern American literature. Forging an idiom that uniquely blended lyricism and brutality, a tragic sense of life and a genius for comic observation, he continued to revolutionize the American theater with a series of masterpieces: the poignant and melancholy Summer and Smoke, the light-hearted erotic comedy The Rose Tattoo, the sprawling and surrealistic Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning portrayal of a ruthless family struggle.

This volume also contains Battle of Angels (an early version of Orpheus Descending), and a selection of Williams’s one-act plays, including 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Property Is Condemned, and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, a meditation on the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. This edition includes a newly researched chronology of Tennessee Williams’s life, explanatory notes (including cast lists of many of the original productions), and an essay on the texts. This volume is edited by Mel Gussow (1933–2005), who was a drama critic, a cultural writer at The New York Times, and author of several books, including Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, and by Kenneth Holditch, professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, editor since 1989 of the Tennessee Williams Journal, and the author of In Old New Orleans. Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1955 is kept in print by a gift from Richard Poirier to the Guardians of American Letters Fund , made in memory of Richard Santino. Table of Contents Tennessee Williams Essay - Williams, Tennessee (Vol.

111) - eNotes.com Williams, Tennessee (Vol. 111) Tennessee Williams 1911–1983 (Born Thomas Lanier Williams) American playwright, novelist, essayist, short story writer, screenwriter, and poet. The following entry presents an overview of Williams's career through 1995. For further information on his life and works, see CLC, Volumes 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 30, 39, 45, and 71. Tennessee Williams is distinguished for his psychologically complex dramas that explore isolation and miscommunication within families and small groups of misfits and loners. Breaking from the realistic tradition in American drama, Williams introduced his concept of the "plastic" theater by incorporating expressionistic elements of dialogue, action, sound, setting, and lighting in his works. Williams's reputation rests on his three award-winning dramas—The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955).

Each of these is set in the American South, employing lyrical dialogue and inventive stage techniques, and represents a powerful study of family dynamics and the solitary search for meaning in the modern world, particularly through the depiction of emotional abuse, sexual relations, and violence. For his remarkable ability to evoke universal experience in multi-dimensional characters and provocative plots that transcend geography and social milieu, Williams is recognized as a major influence in the development of postwar American theater. Biographical Information Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents at an Episcopal rectory in Clarksdale, Mississippi; his father, a travelling salesman, was frequently absent. As a young child, Williams survived a near-fatal bout with diphtheria that left him physically weakened and in the constant care of his overprotective mother. Williams also developed a close attachment to his older sister, Rose, whose schizophrenia and later mental deterioration after an unsuccessful lobotomy had a profound effect upon him. At age twelve Williams moved with his family to St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was transferred for a managerial position.

Away from the security and familiarity of his rural upbringing, Williams became the subject of ridicule among his new urban peers and unsympathetic father, who nicknamed his shy and sickly son "Miss Nancy." Williams began to write poetry and short fiction to relieve the strain of such derision and alienation. At age sixteen he won an essay contest sponsored by Smart Set magazine with "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?," which became his first published work. In 1929 Williams entered the University of Missouri, though he was forced by his father to return home after failing ROTC in his third year. He worked in a shoe warehouse and continued to write until suffering a nervous breakdown in 1935. During the same year, while recovering at his grand-parents' home in Memphis, Tennessee, Williams was introduced to the theater and produced the comedy Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, his first play. Deciding on a career as a writer, Williams returned to St. Louis to attend classes at Washington University, then transferred to the University of Iowa where he studied playwriting and earned a degree in English in 1938.

The next year he published "The Field of Blue Children" in Story magazine, his first work to appear under the name Tennessee. After winning an award from the Group Theater in 1939 for a series of one-act plays, Williams received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship which he used to compose Battle of Angels (1940), a short-lived critical failure that opened in Boston. In the early 1940s, Williams worked odd jobs and eventually secured a salaried position with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, for which he produced several unaccepted screenplays and was released at the end of his contract. During this time he wrote The Glass Menagerie, the first of his major accomplishments, which received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1945. Though struggling with fame and pressure to duplicate this success, Williams followed with A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, both of which won New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and Pulitzer Prizes.

During the 1950s, Williams produced the dramas The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Camino Real (1953) along with the novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), and adapted the script of A Streetcar Named Desire into a popular Hollywood film that appeared in 1951. In the second half of the decade, Williams underwent intensive psychoanalysis to treat his depression, providing material for Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Period of Adjustment (1959). Williams was again plunged into despair in 1963 when Frank Merlo, his long-time partner, died of lung cancer. After The Night of the Iguana (1960), his last notable success, Williams continued to produce numerous dramatic works of diminishing critical importance until the end of his life. His mental instability and increasing dependence upon drugs and alcohol worsened during the next two decades. In 1969, Williams converted to Roman Catholicism and was briefly hospitalized following another mental breakdown. Eight years after the publication of his Memoirs (1975), Williams accidently choked to death on the cap of a medicine bottle.

Major Works Williams's mature dramatic style is best represented in his three greatest critical and commercial successes—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The most lyrical and tender of the three, The Glass Menagerie is a semi-autobiographic play drawn directly from Williams's childhood experiences with his mother and mentally ill sister. Set in a St. Louis tenement during the Depression, the drama involves the Wingfield family, whose three adult members include Amanda, a domineering mother who bitterly resents her absent husband; her son, Tom, a writer who works in a shoe factory; and his sister, Laura, whose extreme timidity and crippled leg confine her to the house. Tom, as Williams's dramatis personae, narrates the story through retrospective commentary and monologues that underscore the tension between reality and illusion, especially as Amanda romanticizes her past life as a beautiful Southern debutante and Laura tends to her collection of glass figurines, to which the title of the play refers, a symbol of fantasy and her physical and emotional fragility. The dramatic climax occurs when Amanda persuades Tom to find a suitor for Laura.

Tom invites a co-worker, Jim O'Connor, to dinner to meet his sister. Though Laura and Jim enjoy each other's company, Jim abruptly leaves after informing Laura that he is already engaged to be married. The audience learns in a final monologue that Tom, like his father, has also abandoned his mother and sister to pursue his own destiny and to escape his guilt for shattering their hopes and expectations. Despite the simple plot, Williams blends elements of expressionism and realism in poetic dialogue, pervasive symbolism, and music and lighting effects that evoke the sensations of memory. A Streetcar Named Desire similarly examines family tensions and the theme of illusion versus reality, but is far more violent and grim than The Glass Menagerie. Set in the vibrant French Quarter of New Orleans, the play follows the demise of Blanche Dubois as she is drawn into a dangerous, antagonistic relationship with her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. As the title suggests, the play revolves around the idea of desire as an unyielding and destructive force. Blanche arrives at the home of Stanley and her sister, Stella, after witnessing the dissipation of her family estate and the suicide of her husband, whom she berates after discovering that he is gay.

Conflict between Blanche and Stanley soon escalates as a result of Blanche's flirtations and condescending treatment of Stanley, an unrefined man who is threatened by her genteel pretensions. As a social commentary, Blanche represents the effete values of the dying Southern aristocracy while Stanley embodies the energy and earnestness of the working class. The tension between them culminates when Stanley rapes Blanche, after which she is committed to a sanitarium where she retreats further from reality. The hero of the play remains ambiguous as Williams skillfully tempers sympathies for Blanche and Stanley to confront and challenge audience expectations. While Blanche's haughty teasing and hypocritical virginal posturing is balanced by her difficult past, Stanley's coarseness and brutality are mitigated by his appealing sexuality, honesty, and sincere love for Stella. As in The Glass Menagerie, Williams offers sensitive treatment of the female characters and profound insight into their psychological motivations. Blanche, like Laura and Amanda, appears fragile and unable to cope with the harshness of reality, particularly as she constructs a facade of lies about her sordid history.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is set in the Mississippi River delta at the plantation home of Big Daddy, a wealthy cotton farmer whose family has assembled to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday and false news that his cancer is in remission. The complex plot, fraught with Freudian undertones, centers on the implications of mendacity and self-deception, particularly as Big Daddy's favorite son, Brick Pollitt, wallows in alcohol to avoid facing the actual nature of his affectionate relationship with Skipper, a high school friend who has killed himself through drug and alcohol abuse. Distraught over Brick's drinking and detachment, Brick's wife, Maggie, suspects a homosexual attachment between her husband and Skipper. Maggie has previously seduced Skipper into bed with her to test his sexuality and, after he failed to perform, confronted Skipper with the "truth" about his feelings for Brick. When Big Daddy demands that Brick reveal the source of his compulsion to drink, Brick explains that Skipper telephoned him shortly before his death with a drunken confession, to which Brick responded by hanging up on him. Big Daddy accuses Brick of causing Skipper's death by failing to face up to the truth.

In turn, Brick spoils the party by revealing to Big Daddy that his cancer is actually terminal. In the end, Maggie's determination to save her marriage is accomplished by cunning and sheer tenacity, to which the title of the play alludes, as she lies to the family that she is pregnant with Brick's child to regain their favor. Though the published version of the play contains two endings, the Broadway version in which Big Daddy departs with an offstage cry and Brick experiences newfound admiration for Maggie is the preferred variation used in most productions. As in much of his work, Williams juxtaposes conflicting aspects of obligation and selfishness, guilt and desire, self-awareness and denial to construct highly developed characters who struggle to overcome severe loneliness and frustration in their circumscribed lives. Critical Reception Williams is considered among the most talented and original playwrights of the postwar period. His three major dramas—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—are undisputed classics of the American theater whose memorable characters have become fixtures in American popular culture.

Though his most effective plays reveal little concern with contemporary political or historical events, his willingness to explore sensitive themes surrounding violence and sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual, was considered controversial in the 1940s and 1950s. Many critics have commented on the distinctive ambiguity of Williams's plays, most notably in the significance of Blanche's rape in A Streetcar Named Desire and Brick's guilt and sexual orientation in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. While some contend that Williams's refusal to present stereotypical dichotomies among his characters or to force judgment is the strength of his work, others suggest such ambivalence represents Williams's failure to resolve his own themes and preoccupations. Despite the success of his major plays during a creative period spanning from 1940 to 1960, Williams's prolific output of critical failures thereafter is a well-noted feature of his literary career. In addition, some critics find Williams's obsession with brutality and sex to be a sensational aspect of his work, particularly in the less successful allegorical or morality plays such as Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, and Suddenly Last Summer.

This gothic quality of much of his writing, marked by interest in the aberrant, irrational, and macabre, is often associated with Southern Renaissance writers such as Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor. Though his realistic narratives and credible characters are compared to those of Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, it is Williams's unique ability to adapt elements of realism and expressionism that distinguishes his work from that of his contemporaries. A dynamic innovator and deeply perceptive artist whose theater evinces poignant compassion for the vulnerable and victimized, Williams achieved both critical and popular acclaim while redefining the standards of American drama. Start Free Trial Start your free trial with eNotes to access more than 30,000 study guides. Get help with any book.

Question: Which playwright wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Camino Real?
Answer: Tennessee Williams